choose between different forms of power and action, because all varieties of power and action at once are not within its competency. No man, however efficient, can do all things. The most effective men, accordingly, are naturally appointed to, or assume, the weightier, more comprehensive, and therefore, as we say, more dignified tasks; while the less effective are devoted to plans and agencies of a less extensive, and, accordingly, as we account them, a meaner character. Through their partial power, the men who are equal to the more imposing cares, and therefore are assigned to such, find it necessary to relinquish the less important, and devolve them, for the most part, on persons of less capacity and pretension. Accordingly, occupation in, and concern for, mere details, comes to seem to us inconsistent with the idea of human greatness; and, transferring this view to the Divine Being, we come hastily to conclude, that such occupation and concern. would be also unworthy of him.

I suppose that it is chiefly through this way of reasoning, or rather through this impression, that the great doctrine of a particular Providence labors under a prejudice. Many men think it unworthy of God to take care of the little, as if it were not the greatest glory of the greatest intelligence to be able and disposed to take care of the great and the little both. But does any reflecting mind doubt, that what is so often considered a concomitant and character of human greatness, is itself a result and sign of the impotence. and limitations of that greatness? Would not the mind, which could dispose the most largely of both principles and details, be the greatest mind; and to object to an administration which developes both of these characters, that it cannot, for that reason, proceed from God, is not this to find an argument against his opera

tion, in one of the very signatures of an agency, to which, in its fullest extent, he alone of all beings is competent?

From this preliminary remark, I go on to submit, that the fact, which has given rise to it, so far from impeaching the divine origin of the Mosaic institutions, is in reality a contribution to the evidence in its favor. It is not to be supposed, that the reasons which existed for those apparently minute provisions can be fully ascertained at this distance of time; but one hazards nothing in saying, that the more they have been judiciously investigated, the more satisfactorily have they appeared to be parts, wisely designed, of a law, which was to rescue a barbarous and irreligious people from universal barbarism and idolatry, to fix them in the worship of one God, and to form them to be the instruments of introducing a true theology into the world. They were the expedients of a suitable discipline for effecting that general civilization, out of which a high personal religious culture was ultimately to grow.

My point then, is, that the circumstances of the Jewish nation, when it received the Law, were such, that the appropriate instrument of their discipline was necessarily, as far as we can see, a ceremonial and precise system; a system which should prescribe a ritual of worship, and a course of conduct in common life, with great fulness and exactness. At the time when Moses' Law was promulgated, we know not that there was any thing deserving to be called religion in the world, except what little might be said to exist among the Jews themselves; and among them we have no knowledge that any religious rites were practised, except that of sacrifice, which had been observed from the earliest antiquity, and that of circumcision, which had been prescribed to Abraham, but, in the reverses of his descendants, had probably fallen almost into disuse.

Wherever society existed near them, whether among the wholly savage Canaanites, or among the more polished, rather than more cultivated Egyptians, it was in a state of extreme debasement. And the chosen family were no longer what they had been, when they went down into Egypt to share the splendid fortunes of Joseph. Ages of miserable servitude had broken their spirit, and brought them to that condition of mental imbecility, which is the worst effect of oppression and of bodily hardships; nor do we know that, surrounded as they had been by the corrupting idolatry of Egypt, they had preserved among themselves any acquaintance with religious truth, beyond a remote tradition that Jehovah had revealed himself to their fathers as their patron God.

This rude, depressed, degraded people, were to receive a pure theology, that so they might be instrumental in preparing the world for further revelations of divine truth. With them a course of discipline was to be begun; and the point, from which it was to raise them, was a low condition of intellectual and moral debasement. This being understood, let us ask what course human wisdom would have resorted to, to effect the object. Would a sagacious human legislator, desiring to civilize a barbarous tribe, begin by giving them a system of laws (however good in other respects), so general in their terms, that much exercise of judgment would be necessary in the application of them? Or would he see, that, should he do so, their stupidity, and the very wrong biases which it was his purpose to correct, would make such a labor vain; and that the only effectual way to confine them to the right path was to forbid, in a careful enumeration, such external practices, as would, in any way, have an influence to keep them in their existing state, and enjoin with equal par

ticularity, those actions, the doing of which would have a tendency to withdraw them from that state? Would he reverse the natural order of instruction; or would he follow the example of the parent, who, while his child's comprehension is as yet immature, educates him in certain outward formalities of conduct, that, by their natural influence on his mind, the qualities he ought to acquire may be formed in him, long before he is able to understand the nature of those qualities? Would a wise legislator give to such subjects at once the best possible law; or would he see, that, in order to learn ultimately to respect proper limits, it was needful that they should first learn to respect some limits? Would he expect them at once to adopt comprehensive principles of self-restraint, and devise, for their own government, rules founded on those principles, and adapted to their existing condition; or would he perceive that his prospect of restraining them was the better, the more definitely he declared to them what particular things they should do and forbear?

We have found these questions answered in every successful attempt, of which we may have read, to civilize a barbarous people. And that which it is wise in man to do, is it not wise in God to do more completely? Was it an acknowledged proof of the wisdom of a sovereign, who, in the last century, reclaimed from barbarism a nation now unrivalled in power, that he adapted his laws to the rude state in which those laws found his subjects;* and is it not consistent with God's

* For an account of some reforms of Peter the Great, see Perry's "State of Russia under the present Czar," pp. 194-203; Voltaire's "Histoire de l'Empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand," Tome i. chap. 10. In Coxe's "Travels," Book 4, chap. 4, may be found a remarkable set of minute directions prescribed by that monarch for the regulation of social intercourse. The point might be largely illustrated from any collection of the laws of a people, judiciously guided in taking the first

wisdom, that, by means of a system only differing from this in being far more elaborately and thoroughly adjusted to its end, he saved a people from that idolatry which seemed the almost unconquerable sin of the ancient world, and prepared them to fulfil the great office with which they were intrusted for mankind?

Particulars of this fitness and efficacy of circumstantial laws will offer themselves to our attention, as we proceed. I close this lecture with a few words on the manner of giving the Law.

As far as we could undertake to form any judgment on the subject, we should expect to find such a form of annunciation selected, as would tend to make a profound and effectual impression; an impression both of the obligation of the Law, as then prescribed, and of Moses' authority in whatever he should further declare. Such, in the highest degree, was the manner of annunciation adopted in the audible utterance of the Decalogue from the flaming and smoking top of Sinai; and that the reason of its adoption was what I have suggested, is not only probable; it is likewise expressly declared.* The impression could hardly have been made stronger, it might probably have been weakened, by a continuance of the sublime phenomenon ; and accordingly, through Moses, whose authority it had attested, the rest of the communication is made.† The impression would be still further increased, by commanding the people, on their part, to observe the fit

steps towards civilization. See Gladwin's "Ayeen Akbery, or Institutes of the Emperor Akber;" Wilkins's "Leges Anglo-Saxonicæ." In Turner's "History of the Anglo-Saxons," Book 11, is an account of the Saxon legislation, showing it to have been marked with the character under our notice. Specimens of that legislation, of the same purport, may be found in Henry's "History of Great Britain," No. 3 of the Appendix to Book See also Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws," Book 19. * Ex. xix. 9, xx. 20.

2.

† Ex. xx. 19, 21, 22; xxi. 1.